The Elements of Table Styles

Although programs like Adobe GoLive removed the need for hand-coding the HTML, tables can still be time consuming to edit and tweak while you're working on a Web project. This is especially true when you're prototyping ideas and need to move quickly. To save time and frustration, GoLive 5 introduced Table styles, a tool for applying cell and row colors, text formatting, and other information with a single click. Luxury!

From the author of

From the author of

During the wee early days of the Web, my coauthor Glenn Fleishman and I had
no choice but to build tables with our bare hands. Since there weren't any graphical
HTML editors on the market (heck, there was no market), we laboriously hand-coded
thousands of <TR> and <TD> table tags, working in an old shoe that
had no heat during blizzards every day of the year.

Obviously, things have improved somewhat since those formative years. Although
programs like Adobe GoLive removed the need for hand-coding the HTML, tables
can still be time consuming to edit and tweak while you're working on a Web
project. This is especially true when you're prototyping ideas and need to move
quickly. To save time and frustration, GoLive 5 introduced Table styles, a tool
for applying cell and row colors, text formatting, and other information with
a single click. Luxury!

GoLive's table style control appears in the new Table palette, a floating window
that enables you to easily select cells using a small table proxy (see Figure
1). Switching to the Style tab reveals a popup menu of prefabricated styles
plus a representation of the current style. To use one of these styles, simply
choose it from the popup menu and click the Apply button (see Figure
2). Really, that's all there is to it -- it would take you longer to figure
out how much time you just saved.

Applying prefab styles is all well and good, but it's more likely that you
have your own styles to impose upon your pages. In this case, defining a new
style involves only a little more work.